Daily News - Friday 13 September 2013

Men's rights groups are using domestic violence victims as pawns in a larger game that seems to be less about protecting males or females from abuse and more about discrediting women and promoting other ideological ideas.

The Coalition intends to abandon $1.5 billion of union-linked wage increases for up to 350,000 workers in aged and childcare, challenging one of the union movement’s strongholds.

A spokesman for Prime Minister-elect Tony Abbott confirmed the funding for higher wages committed by the Gillard Labor government would be re-directed because the money was to be funnelled through agreements negotiated by unions, including the scandal-hit Health Services Union.

The Abbott government faces having to spend all of the $300 million promised by Labor to increase the wages of childcare workers or face legal challenges by up to 85 providers who have been given "conditional offers" of funding.

The Coalition Government has committed to a Productivity Commission review into child care and associated benefits to encourage parents back into the workforce. Accessible and affordable child care is crucial to improving workplace participation and the review will be an important first step towards addressing the issue. However, the government’s proposed 10-year timetable for enacting change in this sector must be brought forward. We cannot afford to wait for up to a decade before we start addressing what is a structural problem in our economy.

The Department of Family and Community Services has admitted to not filling caseworker vacancies to manage ''budget pressures'', despite state government assurances that staff shortages are not related to a lack of funding.

The NSW Police Force Boot Drive which has been facilitated by Mission Australia's homeless outreach service, Missionbeat, has already seen hundreds of second hand boots collected from LAC's across Sydney. The boots are then arranged by size and distributed to people suffering from homelessness.

Because they lack money, poor people must focus intensely on the economic consequences of expenditures that wealthy people consider trivial and not worth worrying over. Those without a lot of time have to hoard their minutes, and they may have trouble planning for the long term. The cash-poor and the time-poor have much in common with lonely people, for whom relationships with others are scarce. When people struggle with scarcity, their minds are intensely occupied, even taken over, by what they lack.

Fixating on the treatment of asylum seekers, currently the most destitute class among our body politic, is the easiest way for those anxious and sceptical of globalisation to get to their real target: us, the cosmopolitans. The asylum seekers are collateral damage. We’re really the ones they want to blame.

Every day Kim Asher receives phone calls from people she has never met. One afternoon, a man called to say his pregnant wife and two children had just moved into their house with only a blanket and the clothes on their back.

... Ms Asher learnt from asylum-seeker friends that many were sleeping on the floor in cold, unfurnished houses. She posted a message on her Facebook profile asking friends for mattresses they could donate and a van to deliver them. The message gained momentum after comedian Catherine Deveny posted it on her Twitter profile. ''My inbox exploded,'' Ms Asher said.

Asylum seeker policy experienced a rush of activity in the lead-up to the election. Behind the Abbott government’s bold promise to “stop the boats” in its first term of government is a series of specific proposals – some adopted from Labor, and some of the Coalition’s own creation.

Indonesia will reject Australian Prime Minister-elect Tony Abbott’s plan to disburse million of dollars to Indonesian villagers for information about people smugglers as part of efforts to halt the flow of asylum seekers to Australia, says Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa.

The last commonwealth commission of audit, led by academic economist Bob Officer for the Howard government in 1996, confronted this issue head-on. The budget would never be brought under control unless spending on pensions and allowances was tamed, it said. The indexing of pensions to male total weekly earnings should not be seen as an entitlement. It recommended using the cost of living, with government topping that up when it had the funds to do so.

NGOs are also the harbingers of change, preparing the ground for future public policy. Although others, such as university researchers, scientists, and public thinkers, may generate new ideas and theories and provide scientific or other evidence in support, it is largely civil society organisations that give these ideas and theories publicity and currency and by those means help to get them incorporated into public policy.

Like it or not, the Westminster tradition - of a frank and fearless public service dispensing objective and politically neutral advice while unflinchingly obeying the elected government - has always been a self-serving fiction.

The Bishop of Arundel and Brighton has defended a priest in his diocese following criticism from the local and national press, concerning a blog post the priest wrote about the poor.

Bishop Kieran Conry said that Fr Ray Blake “does an awful lot of good work” in supporting the poor in Arundel and Brighton, adding “it was a bit of mischief” on the part of the local newspaper that published the original story.

As letters to the editor go, it was certainly out of the ordinary, stretching to more than 2,500 words and not one of them veering on the irate or indignant. But the missive received by Eugenio Scalfari, co-founder and former editor of the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, nonetheless made it into print on Wednesday – on the front page and under the impressively brief byline of "Francesco".

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Catholic Social Services Australia represents a national network of 52 Catholic social service organisations that provide direct support to hundreds of thousands of people in need each year on behalf of the Catholic Church. Our agencies provide a diverse range of support from assisting women and children escaping family violence, housing and homelessness support, to mental health and disability services. They also work in partnership with Indigenous people, and offer support and services to people seeking asylum and those who are refugees.